Broadcasting: EU Action

Jeremy Hunt: To ask the Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport what estimate he has made of the cost to business in the UK of implementation of the EU Audiovisual Media Services Directive; and what the regulatory costs of its predecessor were.

Andy Burnham: The estimated additional cost of the EU Audiovisual Media Services Directive is £505,000 per annum plus £250,000 in one-off transition costs.
	We set out these costs in the preliminary impact assessments published with our consultation on 31 July 2008. They will fail to be met by the video-on-demand industry, and by non-EU satellite channels uplinked from the UK. They do not take into account the savings to the industry of replacing the current self-regulatory arrangements for video-on-demand services.
	Updated impact assessments will be published with the implementing regulations later this year. I have made no estimate of the regulatory costs of the Television Without Frontiers Directive, which preceded the AVMS Directive and was last revised in 1997.